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Wednesday, 2 October 2013

Month of Guests 2013, The Waking World Blog Tour and Book Addicted Boys: Tom Huddleston

I was talking on Twitter to a bunch of awesome bloggers – one of whom was a boy. We were talking about how few male bloggers there are. And so I thought: Why not create a feature specifically designed to get boys into blogging – and reading? And so Book Addicted Boys was born!

The Waking World is a post apocalyptic tale based on the legend of Merlin and Arthur, packed with action, mystery and adventure. It is the debut fantasy novel by talented new author Tom Huddleston.

Enjoy! :D

Five Reasons Why Books
Are Better Than Films Or Computer Games

It’s so easy these days to just switch on the TV, or fire up
the Playstation, and settle back for a couple of hours. It’s fun, too! But
there are experiences you can get from a book which you can’t get anywhere
else, places you can go which no film or game can take you.

Epic Size!

You might walk out of a sci-fi or fantasy film feeling like
you’ve seen something truly spectacular: an alien planet, an epic landscape, an
army on the march. But really, you’ve only seen the bits of that world that the
director and his special effects team had the time and the budget to show. In a
book, there are no budgets, no time constraints, and the only limits are the
writer’s – and the reader’s – imagination. In Mervyn Peake’s Titus trilogy, for
instance, the huge, half-ruined castle of Gormenghast seems to grow with every
page as the characters explore each crumbling tower, each winding stair, each
cobwebbed room. The castle could never exist in the real world – it’s too huge,
too complex, too strange – so attempts to film the books always fall flat. The
only place it can exist is in the reader’s mind.

Depth and History

I really enjoyed Peter Jackson’s films of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, but there’s no
way you could cram all the historical scope of JRR Tolkein’s books into three
films, however long they were. When you read the books, you’re not just
following Frodo and Sam as they journey to Mordor, you’re also learning about
how this world came into being, the history and languages of elves, dwarves and
men, the battles they fought and the great heroes who emerged. This adds so
much to the book – it makes it feel as though the landscape the characters are
travelling through is ancient and full of stories, and completely real. And
that makes our own heroes’ task feel even more impossible and terrifying: if
those legendary warriors couldn’t defeat Sauron, how are two little Hobbits
supposed to manage it?

Getting Into Characters
Heads

In a computer game, you don’t need to get into the
character’s head – the character is you. But haven’t you ever wanted to live
someone else’s life for a little while, to see what they see and feel what they
feel? A book is the only place where such a thing is truly possible, provided
the writer knows what they’re doing. In Rosemary Sutcliffe’s ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ we’re invited
into the head of a Roman Centurion marooned behind Hadrian’s Wall and pursued
by savage Celtic tribes. Here we are, centuries in the past, in a world we
barely recognise, and our only guide is this tough soldier, lost in the
wilderness – and yet we relate to him completely, we trust his choices, we feel
his hurts, and we’re with him every step of his journey.

Length of Stories

This is one area where movies and TV are finally starting to
catch up to books – it would have been impossible to imagine an 8-part film
series like ‘Harry Potter’ being made
even 20 years ago. But still, books have the edge: just think of Richmal
Crompton’s William stories, for
instance, which fill around 40 books, or the Sherlock Holmes tales, of which there are well over 50. My own
favourites, the King Arthur legends, seem to go on forever, with tales of this
knight or that, all of them packed with adventure and dastardly deeds – and new
writers are coming up with more of them all the time. If you find a character
you love, you just want to know more and more about them, to share more and
more of their experiences, and that’s something that can only really happen in
books.

One Person’s Story

A computer game isn’t the vision of one person, there’s a
huge team working for years to design every baddie and map out every landscape.
Even films, which often claim to be ‘made’ by one director, are actually a
massive group effort: you have scriptwriters, designers, cameramen, sound
recordists, composers, editors and actors bringing a little bit of themselves
to the finished work. And that’s a great thing: the collaborative process can
make for a really exciting piece of work which no one person would’ve been able
to produce on their own. But a book is the product of one mind, one vision,
which gives it a focus which those other artforms can often lack. This one
person ‘scripts’ every scene, ‘plays’ every part, ‘shoots’ everything the
reader sees. This is their world, and they’re inviting you inside. Also, it
means there’s only one place to send your questions or complaints to!

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Thank you so much for this post, Tom - and for being my first Book Addicted Boys author!! :D

Hope you all enjoyed Tom's post! And don't forget to follow Tom on Twitter, and check out his books on Goodreads! :D

And keep up to date with MonthOfGuests on Twitter using #MonthOfGuests2013! And stop by tomorrow for a brilliant post by the amazing Joss Stirling!!

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Tom Huddleston is an author, musician and journalist currently employed on the film desk at Time Out London. Though he grew up in North Yorkshire - where his debut novel, The Waking World, takes place - he currently resides in Stoke Newington in East London. He intends to continue writing fiction, and has already begun a sequel to The Waking World.

Upcoming Blog Tour!

About Me

Hello, my name's Megan, and I'm a Book Addict.
I love teenage Dark Romances, classical novels and anything that involves vampires, werewolves or anything even remotely related to the supernatural.
I also blog at The Girls Of YA with my wonderful blogging partner Emma from Never Judge A Book By Its Cover!